


nightmares and dreamscapes

by heartofwinterfell



Category: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Post-Canon, and especially the bway year two cast, in this house we love and respect cursed child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-10 14:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20853464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofwinterfell/pseuds/heartofwinterfell
Summary: In the months after their time-bending adventure, Albus and Scorpius learn to live with the dreams and the nightmares.





	nightmares and dreamscapes

_“I think you better ask Rose if she thinks it’s a good idea.”_

His joke falls flat. Or, maybe it’s not a joke at all. It’s a test. He’s testing his best friend - the best friend still standing half in his arms in the middle of a staircase that’s liable to move at any moment leaving said best friend stranded a lot farther away from the quidditch pitch and Rose Granger-Weasley and suddenly Albus likes that idea very much -

Scorpius pulls away completely, as though the joke-not-joke snapped him out of a daze he hadn’t realized he crash-landed into. He scampers back down the stairs again (that’s his best friend always scampering and stumbling like a cute animal just getting its legs under him) and says a final goodbye, leaving Albus to his bonding day with Harry Potter and the singular thought:

_Huh._

…

Christmas remains cancelled. McGonagall hadn’t lied about that one. Scorpius isn’t quite sure Headmasters or Headmistresses are allowed to cancel holidays and keep students confined to a building that could at times resemble a medieval prison, but he’s not betting on his father or Harry Potter crossing the headmistress again.

Scorpius stands with Albus at the train station to bid James, Lily, and Rose goodbye (“We’re all trying to start over,” Albus mutters after a thirty second hug from his older brother) and they take their time climbing back to the castle, to the quiet Christmas that awaited them.

So not so unlike the Christmas Scorpius would have had anyway. He can now count two-person tree decorating and feast-eating as some of his specialities, along with quiet carols and whispered holiday resolutions. He had gotten so used to the silent Malfoy manor festivities it only occurred to him on their second day in the castle that Albus might actually miss the hustle and bustle of too many people in too few rooms.

“No, I don’t.” The scoff should be enough to put out the common room fire. “McGonagall couldn’t have picked a better punishment, honestly.”

“Then...is something else wrong?” So far, Scorpius has been decorating the tree he transfigured from a coat rack alone. He didn’t have the energy to transfigure ornaments and Albus wouldn’t let him put lit candles in the tree like he saw in the Diagon Alley shop windows, so little forgotten trinkets around the common room will have to do.

On the couch, Albus fiddles with the book he hasn’t been reading over the past hour. “I’ve been thinking about resolutions...you know, for the new year.”

“Like no more time turning.”

Albus glares, finally putting the book down and sitting up a little straighter. “I just-...I want to be more honest, this year. About what I’m feeling, when I’m feeling it. All this stuff with my dad-...I think it started because neither of us ever wanted to admit to what we were feeling and then we’d just yelling out all the wrong things.”

His mind flashes to the dark world, to that afternoon in his father’s office, and how obvious it became that the dark counterparts of his father and himself used fists instead of words to resolve their problems. If you could even call such a thing resolution.

He’s known for a long time that his father says most of what he means in between the lines. Scorpius likes to think he has most of the language down now, even if he doesn’t speak it himself, and he’s starting to understand Draco Malfoy wasn’t born that way. It was instilled in him, as a protection, slowly over time. Maybe Scorpius too can make a resolution to be more honest and, in return, his father may start feeling he can say what he means.

“Where’d you go?”

Scorpius glances up. Albus is staring at him, head tilted slightly. “I was just thinking…” He pauses, wondering if now is the time to really tell Albus everything that happened in the dark world, fill in the glaring gaps he left.

There’s still an ornament in his hand, waiting for a spot on his little tree. Maybe after Christmas.

“I was thinking it’s a good idea. Being more honest...with your dad.”

…

His nightmares are never the same.

Sometimes, he’s with his father in the church, crawling out of the grate just in time to see the pew smashing to the ground and crushing his father beneath it. In others, he’s lost in the maze of the third task, running into Cedric only for Delphi to appear from above and kill him before her father gets the chance to.

Those nightmares are infrequent, though, compared to the ones where Scorpius, just out of reach, lies screaming under the effects of Delphi’s curse. When he wakes from those nights, the images wither, but the screams echo loud and Albus knows the sound will never fade, even with time.

“I wish I could tell you that you’re wrong,” his dad says. This time, Albus had asked for the walk. The dirt packed over Craig’s crave is still fresh. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell your brother or sister?”

Albus nods.

“Your aunt - Hermione - when we were captured and taken to Malfoy manor, Bellatrix Lestrange tortured her. Ron and I -” He stops abruptly, a shudder overtaking him. Albus takes a step closer to him, hand flexing at his side. “We heard her screams, from where we were kept. I had never seen Ron like that, I thought he was going to break his arms trying to get us out of the cell we were in. But we couldn’t do anything.”

Albus takes another step, slipping his hand into his father’s and squeezing.

“I still hear those screams.”

“Does anything make it better?”

Releasing Albus’s hand, his dad removes his glasses to wipe the tears welling up in his eyes. There’s a small smile on his face though. “Yes. Seeing her, every day, being extraordinary. Getting to see her children be extraordinary. We’re all made of stronger stuff than we think, Albus.”

When he returns to the grounds, Scorpius is waiting for him on the periphery of the Whomping Willow. “I’m starting to think Malfoy the Unanxious has a death wish,” Albus says, eyeing the tree and its tiniest of movements.

“I happen to think Willow here and I have the makings of very good friends.” There’s a satisfied little smile on his face that often blooms when he thinks he’s made a particularly good joke. That he can still smile like that makes Albus’s heart stutter.

Scorpius is not prepared for the hug that engulfs him.

...

His hands are sticky. When he looks down at them, they’re slick with blood. As his gaze travels further downward, he sees a figure cowering at his feet. The person only has the barest hint of a face, yet he can still see the naked fear in their green eyes. Eyes like Albus’s, betrayed and in agony.

That does not stop his sure fist from coming down and the green eyes screw shut.

“_Scorpion King_.”

It’s Rose’s voice, but sneering. It’s Delphi’s voice, though she never spoke the words. It’s a mix of all the voices that have ever meant something in his life and they’re angry and hurt, vengeful and afraid, disdainful and encouraging. He doesn’t know which side of the coin is worse.

The muggleborn is crying out for his father. He wants to cry out for his, too, and his cheeks are now sticky to match his hands. That’s how he knows he’s close to waking up, when the sensations start bordering on too real. It never makes it better, knowing he’s on the brink of waking. On the contrary, it always makes it worse. It makes the final blows crackle, the hits actually reverberating through his bones.

Scorpius leaves the nightmare without making a sound. Screaming is too difficult with the lead weight on his chest. Sometimes he opens his eyes and he’s not breathing at all.

He always looks at his hands first, to remind himself there’s no blood there. But tonight the shadows from his curtains, cast over his knuckles, look too much like the dark stains of blood he’ll never wash off.

So he looks at Albus instead. A large part of him wants to sneak out of his bed, crawl to the foot of Albus’s and pop up over the frame, scaring him like the night he called himself Malfoy the Unanxious and almost meant it. The night he made his most deadly mistake.

Albus snorts in his sleep, laughing at a joke that he hopes dream Scorpius made, and turns over, obscuring his face. Scorpius thinks better of waking him. He gets less sleep than Scorpius does nowadays and Scorpius doesn’t want to suck away the few precious peaceful hours he gets.

He’ll trace the folds in his curtain canopy instead and recount facts of the Ogre Wars, or go through Arithmancy time tables, or review spells that will keep the people he loves safe. It’ll calm his heart rate, eventually. It’ll do.

…

High up on the astronomy tower, a cloudless night with a million pinprick stars above them, and Scorpius is staring at the ground. Albus notices, because he’s always joked about how Scorpius would get the worst crick in his neck from how he spent the entire class with his eyes never leaving those stars. On nights with a full moon, his hair glows.

Tonight there’s no moon, but enough light to see Scorpius’s third yawn in five minutes. At the beginning of the fourth, Albus nudges his foot gently against Scorpius’s.

“You know you really can’t trust me to take notes for you, right?” Albus asks in a whisper, mostly to avoid Polly Chapman hissing at him. “At least not notes that are up to Scorpius Malfoy’s standards.”

Scorpius nods, but it doesn’t appear he’s really listening. His head doesn’t even come up, his chin still brushing his chest.

Albus thinks about Christmastime. He thinks about resolutions and being more honest. He thinks part of being honest is holding out a hand to someone, regardless of fear they may not want to take it.

“I think about sometimes -” Albus’s eyes drift over to where he can make out the quidditch pitch. He swallows at just the sight. “How it was so nice that night. There were a million stars out, just like this. And how it seemed unfair that it was nice, like all bad things should have to happen when it's dark and stormy.”

When Albus looks beside him again, Scorpius is staring, as if unsure that anything Albus just said was real. Albus knows that feeling well.

“You can wake me up,” Albus says, ignoring how his heart rate picks up at this small, yet somehow monumental suggestion. “When it gets bad, wake me up.”

Scorpius nods again, but this time Albus reassures himself that he’s listening.

It’s confirmed an hour later when they’re packing up their things and Scorpius says softly, “I’ve thought about that, too. How many stars were out that night. I remember when -...after the curses, just looking up and seeing my dad’s constellation.”

Something heavy lodges in Albus’s throat and without thinking, he seizes Scorpius’s hand in his, squeezing tight.

Scorpius looks down at their interlocked hands and frowns, the pondering kind he often gets when he’s puzzling out his Arithmancy homework. Albus is ready to snatch his hand away when Scorpius squeezes back and says, “Please wake me up, too.”

The small smile Scorpius gives him makes any dumb, tension relieving joke fly out of his mind.

…

The dementors have nearly finished consuming Severus Snape’s soul when he wakes, the airy shrieks following him into the real world. It takes several blinks to clear the film of tears from his eyes and when the room comes into focus, he’s met with the sight of Albus, hunched over with his back to Scorpius and sitting on the edge of his bed, head buried in his hands.

Rushing out of bed is easy. Actually crossing the small divide between their beds is difficult. Scorpius doesn’t want to scare Albus and inadvertently cause him to lock up and tell Scorpius they’ll talk about everything in the morning, only for the morning to come and the conversation brushed off until it’s forgotten completely.

Scorpius settles for hovering on the other side of the bed and quietly whispering, “Albus.”

He jumps anyway, hands flying from where they were fisting strands of his hair to clutch the rumpled blankets. His head doesn’t turn when he says, “I’m fine.”

“You said you would wake me up.”

“I know,” Albus says, a little too quickly and a little too loud. Scorpius watches his eyes sweep across the room, but it seems like no one has stirred. When his eyes finally meet Scorpius’s, briefly, he mumbles, “I’m sorry.”

Albus adjusts his position so he’s sitting cross legged on the bed, leaving enough room at the end. Scorpius needs no further invitation to clamor in and mirror Albus’s position. Their knees knock against each other. Scorpius doesn’t move back. He notices Albus doesn’t either.

They sit like that, silent, for some time. Albus spends it playing with the hem of his pajama pants. At every point Scorpius thinks he’s about to break the silence, he presses his lips together and focuses more intently on a stray thread.

So Scorpius does what he does best. “I dream a lot about the dark world. That’s most of my nightmares, actually. The one I had tonight, I had to watch Snape get a dementor’s kiss. I didn’t really see it, when I was really there. I had already gone into the lake at that point. But I did see the dementors suck out the soul of your -...of Ron and Hermoine, and I think my brain fills in the rest. I tend to wake up right before the dementors come for me, right before -”

“Apparently, you can’t die in dreams.” Albus meets his eyes again, but he just as quickly looks away. He keeps talking though and Scorpius takes that as a promising sign. “Most people wake up like you did, right before. I think I’d rather be able to die, though. Than have to keep watching my dad die. Or you die.”

Albus’s hands are in his lap now, another short distance Scorpius suddenly finds difficulty to breech. Then, he thinks of what his mother used to say, a little lesson imparted to him the two times she was there to see him off on the Hogwarts Express. Many people are easily daunted by the idea of reaching out first. That’s why the greatest gift you can give someone is the first smile, or the first offer of a free seat, or the first sweet.

Albus made the first move on top the astronomy tower. It’s Scorpius’s turn.

Scorpius grabs both of Albus’s hands before his mind can provide counter-arguments against it. He then ignores the surprise in Albus’s eyes to say, “I meant what I said, about being tested and about being prepared to die fighting her. If anything had happened to me -”

“Scorpius -”

“If anything happened to me,” he says again, trying to be as firm as he’s capable of, “it wouldn’t have been your fault.” Scorpius can tell by the way Albus is studying their hands that he doesn’t believe him. “Delphi always existed. If not us - us - she would have found another way.”

“You’re starting to sound like my dad,” Albus mutters.

Though he knows Albus won’t be pleased by it, Scorpius can’t help the small thrill that runs through him being compared to Harry Potter.

As if reading his mind, Albus scoffs. “You don’t have to look so pleased by that.”

“Well, considering I have been your dad before -”

“Oh, come off it.”

“Don’t make me tell you to go to your room, son,” Scorpius tries in his best Harry Potter voice, only to have his voice crack in two at son.

“I’m already in my room.” The small smile tugging at the corner of his lips betrays him.

They spend the next ten minutes doing their finest impressions of their respective fathers and it’s finally enough to have one of their roommates threaten them with a hex to shut them up. That only inspires Albus to pull the curtains closed and Scorpius to charm it silent. The impressions, and whispers, and laughter continue into the small hours of the morning.

…

Albus wakes from nothing. At first, it’s hard to discern why that’s important. It’s only when he tries to recall what fresh horror he had awoken from and his mind comes up blank that he realizes he had fallen asleep the second time and dreamt of blissful emptiness.

He begins to stretch his legs out when his feet come into contact with something heavy at the foot of his bed. Peeking over, Albus is met with the sight of Scorpius curled up in a tight ball at the bottom of his bed, lips slightly parted and blonde hair sticking up everywhere.

He imagines reaching over and smoothing it all back into place. Scorpius would wake up and give him one of his dazed, half-awake smiles that Albus needs now to make it through the day.

Suddenly, with clarity only an early morning admission can bring, Albus thinks -

_Oh._

  
…

He has developed an uncanny ability to know when he’s dreaming. Perhaps it would make him an excellent Divination student. The reality is it only makes him tired and disoriented when he wakes and leaves him little else.

This dream has caught him off guard. Scorpius has grown used to darkness, not merely the metaphorical kind, but the physical kind that cloaks every move he and his dream players make. This dream has picked a familiar location - the edge of the lake - but instead of a black night, the sun hangs high in the sky and the lake glistens green under its glow.

Scorpius squints, trying to make out more than just the glare of the sun reflecting off the water. He’s waiting, really. His dreams are a constant waiting game - waiting for the dementor, for Delphi, for Voldemort, for anything promising to take his family away from him.

This dream swerves again with a voice calling to him, “Come on, Scorpius! Don’t tell me you’re too afraid of the giant squid to even put your toes in.”

He’s used to that voice crying out to him here, but it’s never happy. Albus sounds joyful, or as joyful as Albus Potter ever can be. And as though he holds him by an invisible tether, Scorpius is bound to follow.

At the very shore of the lake, Albus stands with his pants rolled up on his shins, allowing the water to lap at his bare feet. He’s smiling at nothing and Scorpius is struck by how carefree the smile is. Scorpius can’t remember the last time he’s seen a smile like that on Albus’s face. It’s so foreign, Scorpius has to wonder if he’s dreamt it up.

It’s possible. Scorpius is starting to find one of his greatest desires is to see Albus smile like that every day for the rest of their lives.

“This isn’t real,” Scorpius blurts out, because he can always be counted on to ruin a perfect thing by talking through it.

The admission doesn’t seem to phase this worry-less, wondrous Albus though. He turns his luminous smile on Scorpius and shrugs. Albus Potter, shrugging, like there has never been a weight on his shoulders. “It could be though.”

Albus slides his hand into Scorpius’s, his thumb sweep over his wrist, too close to his skyrocketing pulse.

When Scorpius wakes up, he’s brimming with a happiness he doesn’t know what to do with.

…

“James.”

His brother’s ears perk up like an over eager dog. Albus already regrets this conversation and he hasn’t even gotten past the first word.

“You’ve had girlfriends before.”

James smirks and the regrets increase exponentially. “I have indeed. Though I don’t have much experiencing dating witches of a certain age, so I’m not sure how much help I can be.”

“You and Scorpius are never allowed to speak again.”

“Scorpius? I’m just going off of what Uncle Ron said.”

Albus slams his textbook closed, ignoring the searing glares from the Ravenclaws at the table over, and begins gathering up his things. “Never mind, forget I asked.”

“Albus - Albus, stop.” James snatches his Potions book from his hands and sticks it between himself and the back of his chair. “I only kid because I thought this day would never come.”

Albus furrows his eyebrows. “Me asking you for...relationship advice?”

“You asking me for anything.”

The unexpected honesty of it makes Albus’s brain stall. He dumbly sits back down and tries not to blush at the kind smile his brother is giving him.

It takes a deep breath and masterfully avoiding eye contact for Albus to string his next to sentences together, barely, “I think - I like someone. Someone who is not nearing thirty and homicidal.”

“Thank Merlin,” James says with a low whistle.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

“What do you want to do?”

To be with him seems too simple an answer. Being with him means destabilizing a four year friendship that has quite actually kept Albus alive on more than one occasion. Being with him means confessing to feelings he’s not sure are reciprocated. Being with him may very well be something that will never happen, no matter how many times Albus dreams of the contrary.

He sighs. “I don’t want to mess anything up.”

There’s a beat where James, blank faced, just stares at him. It’s unnerving. James never shied away from playing out every thought and feeling going through his head through exaggerated facial expressions, most seemingly meant to irritate Albus.

The beat paces when James’s face dissolves into uncontained laughter, so bellowing it echoes up into the rafters. The Ravenclaws are not as amused.

“Why are you laughing,” Albus snaps.

“Oh Merlin, I know we Potters are thick, but you may give dad a run for his galleons.”

Some residual indignation rises up inside him. “I am not as thick as dad.”

“You must be, if you’re talking about who I think you’re talking about.” James holds his hand up before Albus can snap again. “I’ll make this quick for both of us: you’ve realized you’re in love with him. You don’t want to ruin the friendship, but being around him now is almost unbearable. Is that all right?”

Albus groans even as he nods.

The littlest things are the most unbearable. In the past, he only passingly noticed Scorpius slowed down to make sure he and Albus were always walking side by side down the corridors. Now, he counts how many times it happens in a day until he loses track. He hardly paid attention to how he and Scorpius knew what dishes to pass to each other in the Great Hall during breakfast, lunch, and supper until this morning when he handed Scorpius the plate of scrambled eggs. Their fingers brushed and Albus about exploded.

The night before, Scorpius asked if Albus was coming down with a fever because he’s been looking very red over the last few days. When Albus tried to pass his excessive blushing off on allergies, he had to sit through a thirty minute questions and answers session on the nature of “muggle” allergies for Scorpius.

As he got ready for bed, he saw Scorpius had conjured a box of tissue and placed them beside his bed. Albus wanted to melt into a puddle. It’s disgusting. It also means he had to spend the better part of the early afternoon working on his fake sneezes.

“I’m an idiot.”

“You are.”

“So says the chief idiot.”

James snorts. “I don’t have any perfect answers for you, but I do know, like everyone else in our family, that you’re never going to lose Scorpius. So I think you have to decide if you want to be a miserable git and keep a secret for the rest of your life or be honest about how you feel.”

“You make my options sound so attractive…”

It’s not long before James leaves for quidditch practice, abandoning Albus with an overly warm Potions textbook and too many warring thoughts bouncing around in his head. All he keeps coming back to are new year’s resolutions and how sick he is of being a miserable git.

…

  
“What are you smiling about?”

_You_.

“Uh-...just excited for Hogsmeade weekend.”

“Really?” Albus asks, brow furrowed. “But we’re still banned from going.”

Scorpius’s brain splutters, trying to string an adequate excuse together. “Yes, well-...Rose! Rose promised to get me some sweets. I’m running low on chocolate frogs.”

Albus’s lips purse at his cousin’s name. “That’s oddly nice of her.”

“Yes!” Scorpius says, a little too fast. “You see - pity!”

Albus nods but a little frown stays on his face for the rest of the day. It’s only later, when Scorpius returns from the library and Albus returns from the alcove he choose to stake out for day, that Albus asks where his new stash of chocolate frogs is and Scorpius has to weave another lie that Rose forgot.

“That sounds more like her,” Albus says and the frown is gone for the remainder of the night.

…

His strangest dreams are often the most banal. What makes them strange is how they occur exactly where he wakes up, lying in bed, staring up at the green velvet canopy above his head.

Scorpius is laying beside him. They’re too big for the twin bed, so his head is resting on his shoulder, blonde hair tickling Albus’s chin, and he’s plastered against his die with what seems like little intention of ever letting him go.

He wants this all so badly it hurts like an electric current coursing through his body. He’d fend off the darkest witches and wizards to have this, but somehow he can’t overcome his own tied tongue.

“I want to tell you everything,” he tells dream Scorpius.

“You can,” the dream replies like it’s that simple. “Some day, we’ll have all the time in the world.”

Something is shaking him, but it’s not dream Scorpius. When Albus opens his eyes, he sees his very real friend leaning over him, shivering. “Can I -”

For a moment, Albus considers shuffling over, a silent but unmistakable invitation to climb in and lay beside him, rapid heartbeat next to rapid heartbeat. Instead, Albus sits up and crosses his legs, watching as Scorpius comes to mirror him like he always does.

“The dark world?”

Scorpius shakes his head, his quivering hands clutched close to his chest as though he’s trying to keep his heart from tumbling out of his chest.

“Craig.”

Albus’s own heart seizes. He has not dreamt about Craig for awhile now. As he quickly catalogues his dreams over the past week, he suddenly finds there haven’t been any nightmares peppered among them. Looking at Scorpius, with the unshed tears gathering in his eyes, Albus is struck by a wave of guilt.

“My dad and I went to his grave about a month ago. Maybe we can go, too, soon. I think it helps.”

Scorpius crashes into him all at once and Albus, not prepared for it, falls back, knocking his head against the bed frame. “Ouch.”

“Sorry! Albus, I’m so sorry. I -” Scorpius’s arms are still wrapped tight around his waist and he has ended up in a strange kneeling position between Albus’s now sprawled legs. If the back of his head wasn’t stinging and his ears ringing, Albus may have found reason to blush.

Given the hour, given Scorpius’s babbling, given how all he wants is for his best friend to feel better, Albus smiles and wraps his arms around Scorpius’s shoulders. “Really, it’s fine. This is the new version of us you have in your head, right?”

Scorpius’s lips part slightly, like he’s about to say something, only to think better of it. In the back of his head, a voice is screaming at him to _say it, say it now_. Only he’s not sure if the voice is yelling that at him or at Scorpius.

The moment is gone when Scorpius slowly sits back on his heels and rubs his hand across his eyes. “I want to go. To the grave. We’ll find a day.”

Scorpius is halfway back to his bed when Albus says, “We’ll have to bring our dads, though. I don’t think we’re ever going to be allowed outside the castle grounds by ourselves again.”

They’re laughing until someone threatens them with even more hexes.

…

“When did you know you liked mum?”

They’re up on the astronomy tower, the sun only just disappearing behind the treeline. Scorpius knows, though his father has never said it outright, that Astronomy was a favored course for him at Hogwarts. They’re the last of a family of constellations and it’s nice looking up at the sky from time to time to remind themselves of the simple and beautiful side of their namesakes.

“When did I know I _liked_ your mother?” his father asks, as though the emphasized word holds no meaning to him. Or he sees Scorpius is dancing around a different word, one with the same number of letters but entirely deeper implications.

“You both always said the marriage wasn’t arranged, that you married each other for -” And there it is, just on the tip of his tongue. Scorpius swallows and looks back up at the sky, searching for stars that aren’t out yet.

Silence stretches between them. As the seconds tick by, the urge in Scorpius to blurt out the first thing that pops into his head grows. He’s about to launch into a narration of his most recent Herbology lesson when his father finally answers.

“I suppose I knew when she asked me what it was like growing up in Malfoy Manor. She didn’t ask to judge me or my actions. She only wanted to know how I felt.” His father smiles up at the sky, where Scorpius always hopes she looks down from. “She was so good like that, your mother. She wanted to listen. And understand.”

“I miss her.”

That’s the great fact of their lives. But every time his father drops any pretense and slides a careful arm around his shaking shoulders, it gets a little easier to bear.

…

There’s shuffling, half in and half out of the dream. Darkness envelopes, so there’s no way to tell the source of the noise. He blindly reaches for his wand, only for his hand to hit a solid body. He recoils, afraid it’s her, ready to ensnare him.

“Albus.”

It’s not her. He reaches for his wand a little more surely now, coursing with confidence that this is no longer a dream. Over these last few of months, he’s grown better about knowing reality from dreamscape. Both are so often jumbled and perplexing, but reality has the sharper edges. Albus wants to believe he can tell real hurt from fiction.

Wand in hand, he whispers, “_Lumos_” and the glow engulfs him and Scorpius. The tear tracks, sparkling on his cheeks, make Albus’s entire body ache.

“Albus,” Scorpius whispers again and his voice breaks.

All Albus does is move over, offering the sliver of space he and his bed have to offer. Scorpius takes it, sliding in beside him and pressing his face into Albus’s chest. As carefully as he can, as if handling the smallest of birds, Albus puts his arms around him and holds on.

“Sometimes...I wish I hadn’t watched them die. Your grandparents,” Scorpius says between small hiccups. “Does that make me a bad person?”

Albus shakes his head, vehement. “Of course not. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t watched them die either.”

Unable to help it, he thinks about the seven of them standing outside that perfectly ordinary little house in Godric’s Hollow and watching two bright lights go out forever. Even the worst of his nightmares have not forced him to relive that. They hardly have to. He relives it enough all on his own.

A minuscule movement from Scorpius tears him away.

“But they really loved each other, didn’t they?” Scorpius whispers, every other word almost getting lost.

Again, he flashes back to Godric’s Hollow, but this time he sees James and Lily Potter leaving their house, beaming down at baby Harry. He sees Lily Potter, again with his father, right in front of him, looking at him before walking by, to never know her son would go on to do the most extraordinary things and her grandson would nearly bring it all toppling down.

She deserved so much more. They all did. Perhaps his father most of all.

“They did,” Albus says after he realizes too long has passed without him saying anything.

“Albus?”

“Yeah?”

Scorpius shifts a fraction of an inch back and Albus’s gut instinct is to pull him back in, tighter. He lets him go though, strangely unafraid of whatever Scorpius needs to say.

“I love you.”

Albus’s answer is automatic. “Yeah - I love you, too.”

They’ve never said that to each other before and it could just be another new version of Scorpius and Albus that Scorpius has in his head. Albus finds it doesn’t matter to him, how Scorpius meant it. As friends, as more, as two broken people who couldn’t begin to heal without one another. Albus loves him as all of the above.

…

He’s going to have bad dreams until the day he dies. Scorpius will eventually learn to be okay with that. He’s thinking of asking his father if there is a wizarding world equivalent to a muggle therapist they can both start seeing. He’s also thinking about going to the Slytherin quidditch open practice to get some pointers for potentially making the team next year. And he’s thinking about what will be served in the Great Hall for supper tonight.

Mostly, he’s thinking about the boy beside him, staring out of the expansive common room window to the lake. You’d think after being near the bottom of that same lake twice, at their own peril, would render it no longer fascinating. Scorpius still finds it extraordinary.

“You know, I don’t think the giant squid actually exists.”

Scorpius’s brain short circuits at that. “What?”

“I’ve never seen it and I’ve been going to school here for just under four years now. I think it’s a hoax.”

“A hoax? The giant squid is a well documented part of the lake’s ecosystem and -” Scorpius stops mid-hand motion on account of Albus’s snickering. “Very funny.”

He tries to push Albus for good measure, just for Albus to dodge him easily and continue to snicker at Scorpius’s expense. What he should find annoying Scorpius finds utterly and completely endearing. It’s the makings of the Albus that has started to appear more frequently in his dreams, the carefree Albus who sees the bright world right in front of him.

“I meant it, last night,” Scorpius says suddenly, before he loses his nerve. “And not just in a...I really meant it.”

Albus blinks and Scorpius thinks about taking it back, only to find he doesn’t want to, no matter what Albus says next. They’ll figure out what happens after this. They always have before.

There was not much room between them to begin with, but Albus carefully closes the tiny gap and takes Scorpius’s hand in his. “I really meant it, too.”

Scorpius decides right then and there that he will get to have this until the day he dies. Albus will just have to learn to be okay with that.

**Author's Note:**

> This one goes out to Nicholas Podany and Bubba Weiler, who are doing the absolute most with the scraps JK and Jack gave them.


End file.
